Replace SSD in HX to increase the cluster usable storage

[SIMMN]

One of my customer has a 3-node production HXAF220C-M5SX HyperFlex cluster. Each node has 8 x 960GB SSD installed with ESXi and vCenter running. They now want to purchase replacement SSDs to increase the overall usable HX cluster storage. I never done this kinda replacement and I honestly do not think this can be done for a brownfield environment (but I could be wrong)...

I did went through the HX DP guide and hardware installation guide, but:

1. According to the HX DP guide, "Mixing storage disks type or size on a server or across the storage cluster is not supported.". This means I have to shut down the entire cluster (all three nodes) to replace the 8 drives each, right?

2. If so, how on earth would this kinda replacement still maintain the existing data on the cluster storage?

Please advise.

[Kirk J · Accepted solution]

The cluster will need to be rebuilt with the larger capacity drives in place.

You would need to have some additional storage outside of hyperflex, in order to copy/move the guestVMs off to prior to the cluster rebuild.

Kirk...

[Steven Tardy · Accepted solution]

To summarize the ask.

You want to remove existing smaller disks (say 500GB) and replace them with new larger disks (say 2TB)?

Yeah, can't do that "live". Would be a backup, wipe, redeploy.

Could maybe be done technically, but this isn't a supported/tested/qualified workflow to accomplish this.

Would take more Engineering work (if it even worked at all) compared to simply redeploy. Sorry.